And speaking of entrails ...

There are economic indicators and then there is this from the last day in July in 2023: an index which tracks the price of luxury watches on the secondary market.  Finance.yahoo.com led to a story by BusinessInsider (https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rolex-recession-luxury-watch-market-prices-falling-fed-interest-rates-2023-7) entitled "The great Rolex recession is here: How the Fed crushed the luxury watch boom". 

Some talking heads believe it augurs ill as it indicates the wealthy are so concerned that they aren't spending wildly.  Others contend it is people coming to their senses.  Still others think it is "flippers" who bought watches intending to resell them for more who have learned that not all investments go up.

And I?  Well, given that I didn't even know that WatchCharts existed, I just find it amusing and look forward to erstwhile MBA students undercovering correlations with my favorite economic indicator, the Baltic Dry Index (BDI) (tradingeconomics.com/commodity/baltic).

New York Times Cheesecake?

A reference to female swim suits in a NY Times article a few weeks ago about a female marketing executive instigated an online search about swim suits.

Since then ads with attractive young women in bathing suits have appeared in my browser on a wide variety of sites.  I certainly didn't expect this to appear in the middle of the page of NY Times on line:

I appreciate the eye candy, but it was, in this instance, just one more thing I had to scroll past.

Cleaning My Desk

This was originally started sometime in late 2022.

In languid preparation for an office move I started sorting the papers on my desk into check later, store, and recycle.  

There was an end-of-year financial statement from 3 years ago - not the sort of thing I'd normally leave around,  a lot of hard copy quizzes (some were pretty clever), and the sort of flotsam I treasure: scrap paper - paper with parts of an essay written by an unknown hand - on which I scribbled something. 

There was part of a treasured verse from James Alley Blues by Rabbit Brown I first heard sung by Willie Watson:

I done seen better days, but I'm putting up with these
I done seen better days, but I’m putting up with these
I would have much a better time, but these girls, now, is so hard to please

His take is more mournful than the original:

I done seen better days but I'm puttin' up with these
I been havin' a much better time with
These girls now I'm so hard to please

On the back of lined paper which had an assignment dated this past January from a student whose name I didn't recognize (she must have dropped the course) I saw this:

As I typed in "fairtale of" into the search text box Google up popped:

 Isn't that wonderful?

Wait!  There's more: "Aaron Schiller - charred house on Martha's Vineyard"   It seems to be named Chilmark House after the adjacent pond( https://images.adsttc.com/media/images/5915/5799/e58e/ceff/6b00/005d/newsletter/2016DS52.485.jpg?1494570849).  Looking at it now I can't understand why I made a note of it.

it might have been the next story about Anthony Esteves using the Japanese shou sugi ban technique to burn boards for a house he built in Maine (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/19/t-magazine/design/anthony-esteves-soot-house.html).  Now I know why this attracted me.  The transparent structure in the background will be "is a classic New England barn — to be finished in soot-paint, of course — which will serve as the family library, home to their collection of over 7,000 books."  
Yo

u had me at 7,000 books.

Napolean / La charge à Eylau

At the beginning of a trailer for the film Napolean with Joaquin Phoenix there's a depiction of a cavalry charge.  Right away I remembered a clip of a cavalry charge from a film starring Gérard Depardieu, but couldn't remember the name of the film

It took an inordinate amount of time, but I went through Depardieu's filmography until I found the wikipedia entry for Le colonel Chabert (1994).  What made the film so memorable was the depiction of the cavalry charge.  At one time I thought the clip could be used in schools to have students imitate the cavalry officers by trying to hold their arms up for the duration of the charge.

That clip from Depardieu's film is on YouTube: "La charge à Eylau" -Le colonel Chabert (1994)